R.P. Barr

Evangelical Error

With Rick Santorum leading the current charge, we are once again hearing choruses of “Don’t impose your values on me. I want to impose my values on you.” That sentiment is blatantly un-American.

Religious freedom means that each person may practice whatever his or her conscience dictates as long as it doesn’t violate the rights of others to do the same. Along the way, the elected representatives of the people have set some broad rules that all must obey so that society may have some order. Laws should be as value neutral as possible.

Before you get excited about what your neighbor is doing with his or her body, I would like for you to step outside some evening and look up. You will be seeing pretty much the same sky that was there a couple thousand years ago when Middle Easterners founded three of the world’s great religions. True, they didn’t see airplane lights or gleaming satellites, but the rest was there—and probably a little easier to see without modern pollution.

In those days, a man (or woman) could cover with his thumb any object he could see in the night sky. No wonder people then believed that this teensy planet was the center of the universe, and all the rest was of little consequence or concern to the Creator.

The books these ancients wrote were about what they could see—not about what God knew. They did not write about distant galaxies, planets or moons. They did not even write about penguins, kangaroos, rainforests, viruses or electricity. God knew about all those things. The ancient holy books are splendid expressions of faith and excellent foundations for the religions that have grown around them, but they are not the works of God.

If you want to see what God wrote, look at the night sky, or a drop of water under a microscope. Every time an animal goes extinct due to man’s greed, we are committing an offence against that creature’s creator. Every time someone kills or abuses another in the name of God, it is blasphemy. If you would protect your soul, protect that which the Creator made.

Genesis 1:28 says that God gave the world, animals and plants, to man to subdue and rule—not to destroy. Personally, I find that and many other sections to be a little self-serving, but nowhere does it say that man can rip the tops off mountains to scoop out the minerals within, nature be damned.

Meanwhile, what fundamentalists everywhere should remember is that men can print thousands of books that are exactly the same. God gave each person a mind that was exquisitely unique. Which do you suppose He would want us to respect more?

An opportunity to show your support

Available on:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Port-Director/R-P-Barr/e/9781432768140?r=1

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/143276814X  where it is also available as a Kindle ebook

 Or in the UK from:

http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=9781432768140

The book is a work of fiction about a terrorist attack on the United States and a Customs and Border Protection Port Director who sets out to prevent the next attack.  I tried to make it a bit more realistic than the usual action-adventure.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have an idea about my style.  The story moves along briskly, and has some suspense and other bits to engage your interest.  You might like it.  If not, the paper version burns nicely and I can get you a bulk rate on enough copies to make a proper fire.

Manipulating tragedy for 5 minutes of fame

 Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.  - Albert Einstein

I’m sure that you’ve heard about the Florida pastor who is planning to burn copies of the Koran on September 11.  What does he hope to accomplish?

A nice little prayer and some discussion of the transitory nature of life might be appropriate.  Maybe a special collection for a memorial.  Let the congregation hold hands for a moment of silence.  That would be nice.  Book burning isn’t.

The pastor, whose name does not rate mentioning here, has said that it is time to stand up to Islam.

He obviously hasn’t done the math.  Of the billion and a half Muslims in the world, fewer than one percent are engaged in violence against the non-Muslim world.  But, this beanbag wants to offend all of them.

Muslims are very strong on symbolism.  They will not see this book burning as the act of a nobody clergyman and an insignificant gaggle of followers.  They will see it as a direct attack on their religion by the United States.  They have no experience with our Constitution, and firmly believe that President Obama could stop this outrage if he wanted.

Even if Islam were united and bent on our destruction, what is accomplished by burning their holiest of books.  Is that going to stop the next terrorist act?  Is al-Qaeda going to recoil and cry, “Oh, no!  If we attack them now they might burn more books!”

If I were to go to Florida and burn a stack of Bibles, I would be attract some unkind language, and a handful of spokesmen would call for my arrest, but in the end it would all blow over and a year from now no one would be talking about it.  The Middle East is not like the United States.  After this bonfire, the grandchildren of children not yet born will still be offended and someone will use this utterly stupid and pointless act as an excuse to blow something up.

Muslims are not communists, they will not see their faith as false and convert.  They will not be intimidated a little fire any more than we were by collapse of the twin towers.  Indeed, Muslim radicals look for any slight to react against.

Our best strategy is to win over as many people as we can, to make friends with as many as will let us.  We must also remember that as long as we are rich and powerful, we will be blamed for the evils of the world by every demogogue that comes down the pike.  Shout “death to America” and you get a crowd; shout “we want democratic reform” and go to prison.   That is reality in most Muslim countries.  Winning hearts and minds is slow and tedious, but it works.  Desecrating holy books only makes a bad situation worse.

Besides, it’s stupid--and not very Christian.

Words are not equal

On July 13, the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC broadcast standards for “fleeting expletives” was too vague to enforce.  I’m sure that it was.  Personally, I would like the burden to be shifted from the broadcasters to the explitive utterers, at least in some cases.  When an athelete or a soldier or a construction worker gets a microphone pushed into his/her face for a reaction to an expletive-laden event, he or she should be forgiven for a candid response.  When professional performers, however, are at televised awards shows, they should be able to control their remarks.

The whole thing brings up, once again, the subject of censorship and the morality of speech.  There was a time when profanity was avoided by educated people although it has always existed.  Mark Twain, for instance, wrote admiringly about the virtuosity of mule drivers concerning foul language.  But, even though Twain was self=publishing, he did not record any of the mule drivers’ actual speech.

 I think that the breakthrough for profanity came with Lenny Bruce.  He was a brilliant observationalist, although not a terribly funny comedian.  If the authorities had ignored his use of blue language in his routines, he might have faded into obscurity.  Prosecution, and repeated prosecution, made him a star for social liberals, the hip set, and the wannabes.  Maybe the best thing he did was prepare the world for George Carlin.

 Carlin was both a genius and truly funny.  Unfortunately, his use of profanity led a couple generations of comedians to believe that dirty words were an essential part of making people laugh.

Now, men, mostly, and some women who sit at desks in air conditioned offices use language that was once the province of those who actually labor for a living.  In some cases, it is because many Office Andy's think the abuse of language makes them cool (or whatever is the current equivalent).  In other cases, they think is makes them sound as tough as they wish they were.

 I don’t consider myself part of any camp, but I have known and worked alongside people who do rough and dangerous work.  I would not dishonor them by trying to imitate or pretend that I am the same.

 To be honest, from an early age, I did make an effort to be cool.  For me it is about knowing yourself and being true to that knowledge.  I am who I am, and I do what I do, and if there’s a price to be paid for that—and believe me, there is—then it’s mine to pay.  Language and clothes and music don’t conceal what is underneath.

 Words are neither moral nor immoral.  However, profanity is destructive to the language I love.  Early in Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words routine, he says that there are more words to describe dirty words than there are dirty words.  But then, he misses the point he just made.  That wealth of vocabulary is the beauty and strength of the English language.  It is something to celebrate and encourage.

If you haven’t read it, or haven’t recently, thumb through John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill.  It is a book with a sexual adventure on practically every page.  That is not the point.  The point is the richness of the language he uses to describe our common and more vulgar body parts and their uses.  Cleland is not Shakespeare wrestling with great themes, but while sitting in a debtor’s prison, he adorned his prose with sparkling gems, and not a “dirty word” in sight.

 Profanity takes away that richness.  The four-letter word for sexual congress is almost never used to describe that delightful activity.  Instead, it is used to indicate abuse, but not only that.  It has gone from being a verb to also being a noun, adjective and adverb.  It is used in moments of surprise, anger, joy, etc.  It is an all-purpose word that replaces dozens, if not hundreds of more descriptive words.  Its use dumbs down society.  “Go [bleep] yourself” now passes for wit.  With acceptance of this practice, we are impoverishing ourselves.

 Yet, English is fast becoming the world’s language.  Native speakers should take care to preserve and nurture it, so that it remains something worth adopting.

Reality and Memorial Day

Have you been watching America: The Story of Us on the History Channel?  It is a magnificent series that emphasizes the experiences of ordinary people.  During their segment on World War II, I heard an interesting line:  “In the first sixteen and a half months of the war, twelve thousand military men die, but sixty-four thousand American workers die through accidents.”

 The narrator did not speculate on how many of the military deaths were accidents.  In fact the pictures reinforced the stereotype that all military deaths are due to enemy action.  It is simply not true.

 The famous non-fiction book, Friendly Fire,  described the anguished search by an Iowa couple to learn the truth of how their son was killed in Vietnam.  As I recall, the questioning began when the mother insisted on seeing her son’s wounds, apparently having assumed they would be horrific.  There was only one tiny hole in his torso.  In the end, the author found that Michael Mullen had been in the field on an operation, and because of the heat and humidity in Vietnam, had taken off his flak jacket to go to sleep.  An American artillery unit some distance away did not take the height of the trees into account when they fired.  A shell exploded in the treetops above the sleeping men and a single piece of shrapnel killed Mullen.

 During that time, Department of Defense records showed that more service men and women died in Vietnam in vehicle accidents alone than were killed in action.  Michael Mullen was not alone.

While I was in Army basic training, two recruits went onto the rifle range during the night or early morning hours and hid behind the targets.  They could not have failed to hear the loudspeaker instructions to the soldiers on the firing line.  Suicides have always been a part of military life and death.

 I was stationed at Presidio San Francisco.  The post had a large stockade.  One of the prisoners there had serious psychological/emotional problems, and was taking Army prescribed medication.  Or, he had been taking it until arriving at the stockade.  His medication was denied him and the prisoner descended into noticeable distress.  One day on work detail, he approached a guard with a shotgun and asked what the guard would do if he ran away.  The guard answered that he would shoot the prisoner.  Not long afterward, the depressed prisoner ran and the guard killed him.

 My unit was the 30^th Military Police Battalion.  We carried .45 pistols on duty.  The normal way of preparing the .45 to fire was to insert a magazine into the grip, and then, by tightly gripping the steel slide,  pull it to the rear and release.  A strong spring snaps the slide back to normal and the mechanism pulls a bullet from the top of the magazine into firing position.  One of my colleagues had seen someone slap the slide hard enough to chamber a round and thought that it looked cool.  So, after checking out his pistol from the armory, he got on the bus to the MP station with the rest of his shift and tried out the trick.  It didn’t work the way he planned.  The young soldier blew a hole through the center of his hand large enough to drop a pencil through, and if the seat in front of him had not been empty, he could have killed someone else.

 Later, during my eight years with the Veterans Administration, I heard a lot of stories about injuries and deaths.  Very few of them involved combat.  There was the black soldier whose hitch was up and received his discharge from a fort in Texas.  He left the base wearing his uniform and somebody shot him to death on the road. 

 There was the Hispanic vet who had been in the Navy.  During one tour of sea duty several Hispanic sailors had disappeared from his ship.  Jumping overboard is apparently a common way that sailors commit suicide.  That’s what everyone assumed happened to the missing seamen.  Then, a large white sailor grabbed the vet that I spoke to and threw him over the side.  Fortunately, he was able to grab onto something (I forget what—a rope or chain or whatever it is that hangs over the sides of ships).  He hung there, dangling over the ocean shouting for help.  His assailant was eventually convicted of attempted murder, but was not charged in the probable murder of the other sailors.

My point is not to say that the dead we honor on Memorial Day did not die as heroes.  Most of them didn’t—not in the conventional way.  What I want to emphasize is that they went to do dangerous work on our behalf.  Of the millions who served, only a few charged up hillsides to attack machine gun nests, or flew in aerial dogfights, but the rest were there.  Crime victims and accident victims, they were away from home in the service of their country and their wounds—their illnesses—were a consequence of that service.  Memorial Day should not be a time to remember Hollywood pyrotechnics.  Service men and women are flesh-and-blood human beings with faults and lapses of judgment who give their energy, their work, their bodies and their lives for people they don’t even know.  They do it for us.

 If anyone reads this who is currently in the military, I have one last remembrance for you.  A young widow called me one day while I was working the phone bank at the VA.  She had just received a letter denying her benefits.  I could hear the strain in her voice and a baby in the background.  She needed those benefits.  I asked what reason was given for the denial.  “Willful misconduct.”  She asked what that meant.  Her husband had been on active duty and he was killed on base.

I asked how he had died.  “He was in a motorcycle accident.”  I took a deep breath because I knew just what had happened and that this woman and her child were not going to receive any medical benefits, or monthly checks, or educational assistance.  Now, I had to tell her.  “Willful misconduct means that he was doing something that he should have known not to do.  In this case—“  I decided to go with the least likely scenario first as if that would soften the blow.  “—if he had stolen the motorcycle, or—“  I felt a lump come to my throat.  “—if he had been driving drunk.”

The other end of the line went silent—proof that I had guessed right.  The baby still fussed in the background.  Finally, in a cracking voice, the woman, managed to say, “Thank you.”  As she hung up, I cursed the son-of-a-bitch who had been so selfish and left his family with nothing.

After all these years, he is still one of a specific few military dead that I exclude from my prayers.  May God bless the rest.

Reconsidering Willie McGee

On May 7, 1951, 35 year-old Willie McGee was executed in Laurel, Mississippi for the crime of rape.  He was a black man—no white had ever been executed for rape—and his victim was a 32 year-old white woman named Willette Hawkins.  His case was an international sensation at the time.  Recently, his grand-daughter, Bridgette McGee-Robinson learned of her grandfather’s fate and returned to Laurel to learn more—the truth if possible.  Her story can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126539134

 The town is still profoundly divided on what happened that autumn night in 1945.  Whites believe the prosecution’s charges.  Stepping back in time, we would see a town, like many in the South, divided by a rail line, with whites on one side of the tracks and blacks on the other.  One interviewee said that as a black child of 6, he knew better than to go on the other side of the tracks.  Yet, McGee allegedly crossed the tracks that night.  According to the charges, he went to a house and crept up on a frail mother of three who slept on the floor next to her sick child while her husband slept in a back bedroom.  McGee held a knife to the throat of the woman’s baby and forced her to have relations with him.  The popularly held opinion from the other side of the tracks held that McGee and the woman had been having an affair and that the accusation arose from the woman being caught having sex with a black man.  The black community believed that version, and still does.  In fact, some members of the black community assert that McGee was playing cards, and not even at the scene of the alleged attack.  The defense did not present this account at trial for fear of inflaming the all-white, all-male jury.

 As someone who grew up in the South, I know that the conviction doesn’t signify anything.  The jury deliberated for less than 3 minutes.  The trial itself was little more than a show.

 The NPR story ends with an interview of the prosecutor’s son.  He says that his father took a bottle of whiskey into a meeting with McGee an hour before the execution, and asked McGee to tell the truth.  The NPR story is a good one, and I am not going to spoil it by revealing what the prosecutor’s son says McGee revealed.  Besides, it may not be true.  McGee was leaving family behind, and may have been thinking of his legacy.  If the defense version was true, he also had a lover whose reputation he may have wanted to protect.

The story did not include the questions I would have asked to help determine what happened, so I will ask them here.  Just don’t expect me to provide the answers, although I believe the answers are out there.

 First is whether Willie McGee had any other brushes with the law.  None were mentioned.  Sex offenders usually commit their crime multiple times, and McGee was about 30 at the time.  That seems a little late to begin deviant practices.   Rape is also either between people who know each other or a crime of opportunity.  Was the Hawkins house convenient to someone crossing the tracks at night?  Did McGee have a relationship with Hawkins or her husband that might have motivated him to commit this violent act?  McGee drove a wholesale grocery delivery truck, but according to him, he became familiar with Ms. Hawkins when he waxed her floor a year or two before.

 The houses of that time had wooden floors, possibly covered with linoleum.  They creak.  Doors squeak.  Did anyone test to see how much noise would be caused by someone creeping into the darkened house?  Especially by someone unfamiliar with the floor plan and furnishings?  How did he find the woman who was not in her bed, but with her child?

It is politically correct these days to assume that in cases in which Southern blacks were denied proper trials the accused were innocent.  Was there a rape at all?

 If there had been a consensual affair, would the woman have allowed her lover to die rather than humiliate herself by admitting the romance?  Actually, yes.  That sort of thing has happened.  McGee did not speak in his own defense.  Would a man on trial for his life keep quiet to protect a woman who was willing to let him die in the electric chair?  Actually, the defense of claiming an affair with a married white woman would not have been helpful.

 If there had been an affair, why would Hawkins accuse him?  Perhaps she believed the romance had run its course and McGee wanted to continue.  Another version had it that McGee wanted to end it and Hawkins reacted as a woman scorned.  There is the rumor that he was also having an affair with Hawkins' maid.  Or, husband Troy Hawkins knew that something was going on and forced his wife to clear her name.  Maybe a neighbor had seen McGee entering or leaving the house, and Hawkins had to explain that.  She could simply have felt guilty about the affair, and blamed McGee to scourge her own sins.

 Except that she didn’t accuse him directly.  Hawkins claimed that in the dark, she didn’t know who her attacker had been.  But, McGee didn’t show up for work the next day and fled town.  Some of his friends placed him near the Hawkins home.  

Whatever the truth, it is a fascinating story, and now, half a century after the fact, there is a book about it, The Eyes of Willie McGee by Alex Heard.  It was a case that outgrew both the individuals involved and the facts.  Some crimes are like that.  Even today.    

Quote: The Ideal Religious Fanatic

Speaking of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams—the subject of her recent book, The Wordy Shipmates--on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, author Sarah Vowell said:

 "He’s the sort of ideal religious fanatic.  He believed that everyone who disagreed with him over his puritan views were going to burn eternally in Hell.  And, he thought that was punishment enough, and so, on earth, we could all live together….I thought if there were more religious fanatics like that nowadays, there might be fewer car bombs.”

Quote: White on War

 

Young men who had gone out even in the first joy of marriage, to be killed on dirty battle-fields like Bedegraine for other men’s beliefs: but who had gone out voluntarily: but who had gone because they thought it was right: but who had gone although they hated it.  They had been ignorant young men perhaps, and the things which they had died for had been useless.  But their ignorance had been innocent.  They had done something horribly difficult in their ignorant innocence, which was not for themselves.

                              --T. H. White, The Book of Merlin

Ian Fleming is 100

Today is the one hundredth birthday of author and creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming.  I’ve read all of the Bond books (at least all of the ones written by Fleming—another author was contracted to continue the series).  And, I have all of the movies on DVD.  I can’t say that Fleming was the best author of his time—Live and Let Die is horribly awkward—but he pitted his hero against megalomaniacs who were trying to take over the world.  This elevation of the enemy as much as the sophistication and invincibility of the hero made the Bond franchise the success it became.  After Hitler and Stalin, the world did not have trouble believing in madmen who had not only the will, but the means to subjugate the rest of humanity.  Fleming tapped into this fear and made it entertaining.  He changed the nature and size of adventure fiction.

 

A few years ago, I visited the place where it all began.  The house where Fleming wrote Dr. No, the first in the series, is now a café.  It hugs the side of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica, 4,200 feet above sea level.  Access is via a former goat path, now mostly paved but still steep and too narrow for two cars to pass without both going onto the shoulder—when there is a shoulder. The asphalt is pitted with gaping potholes and sometimes has sections washed away. But, for those who make it to this modest structure, it is all worthwhile.  Far above the bustle of the island, and in the cool air of the mountain, surrounded by lush green foliage, the Gap Café, as it is now called, is still a wonderful place to get away from distractions.  Blue Mountain coffee, the best in the world, is served in individual French press coffee pots on white table linens.  Outside the windows, hummingbirds hover around feeders.  I don’t know what to believe about Fleming’s wartime adventures or his romances, I envy his choice of a place to write and appreciate this opportunity to recall and share a fond memory.